Chapter 29
Night Eleven
Julian
The apartment was so quiet without Simone. The filter from the fish tank bubbled, somewhere from atop a cabinet Felix meowed, and the rest of it was a silent dead void. She promised to return for Christmas, and in exchange, Julian promised to leave his old work alone.
“Dad, you quit for a reason,” she had said as she was zipping up her suitcase.
Yes, he had. Because after thirty years, the stress of the job literally seized his heart.
But four years later, he was finding that the boredom of ordinary life was its own sort of death.
Was he meant to run his late wife’s candy store for the next decade until he retired to a condo near Simone in Chicago?
“Stop worrying about me,” he had said, and hugged her too tightly by the front door. “It’s my job to worry about you.”
“But if I don’t,” she said, “who will?”
“Sybil and Zeke and Betty.”
“So you’re telling me there’s a reason to worry?”
Julian had laughed, a distraction, and ushered her down to a taxi.
Now it was midnight again, and he was doing the exact thing that he’d promised Simone he wouldn’t.
He closed out of one tab, then another, pushed his shoulders back in his chair and stretched.
He was missing something, his gut told him that much.
But what it was, he had no idea. He needed to start over at the beginning.
He opened his desk drawer, pulled out a file that he’d taken with him when he retired.
He didn’t even need to look at the pictures taken from the fire; they were embedded into his brain.
He ran his fingers over the glossy shots, going inch by inch in case there was some detail that he misremembered or never initially saw.
The fire department had been well over thirty minutes away, and the sprinklers in the building never activated.
When he and Richard, his partner, asked around, it turned out the sprinklers had been broken for two years—everyone in the senior ministry knew about it—but no one bothered to fix them.
We thought we were protected here, he remembered a parishioner, in a head covering and a long dress despite the heat of the summer, saying.
We thought God would protect us here. The man she was standing with looked toward her, his eyes glazed, his mind filled with nonsense, Julian thought, and the man said, Maybe he did, maybe this was just God’s way of showing us a different path.
He and Richard were in the anti-corruption unit, so they were called in when something went awry with a case they’d been watching from afar.
And they had been watching Pastor Aaron from afar.
The air that night had been still so thick with ash residue that it nearly choked Julian, and later Richard suggested maybe whatever they were inhaling had led to Julian’s heart attack.
Like an Erin Brockovich situation, he had said.
It was a na?ve thought, no different from what that woman’s husband had said.
Julian’s heart had been giving out for years, since Robin died.
He reread his notes from the scene.
Pastor Aaron Jones presumed dead—last seen on-site.
Recovery of his wife’s body confirmed. Explosion from unknown source started in the boiler room near the kitchen and raced out of control (*Accelerant?
Arson? Electrical issue?), taking down the chapel, then half of the main building, within minutes.
Several unidentifiable bodies at morgue.
Too charred, waiting on dentals. Youngest daughter, Elizabeth, has not been located.
He reviewed the asterisks. They’d never pinpointed what started it.
The church wasn’t up to code and hadn’t been subjected to an inspection in years.
There weren’t any obvious signs of arson, but then the executive board of the ministry wasn’t particularly interested in answers to begin with.
Richard argued that a dead Aaron Jones was honestly better than an alive Aaron Jones.
“Seriously, come on, man, you know that,” Richard had said, running his foot through the soot by the coroner’s van. “These doomsday cultists, I mean, one fewer of them in the world isn’t the worst thing.”
“Right,” Julian had said, nodding. “But that doesn’t mean that murder isn’t murder. Arson isn’t arson. We still do have jobs to do.”
“You know that they basically marry women into enslavement, right?”
“I do, but does that mean that we just condone murder?”
Richard shrugged. He’d always been a little less by the book than Julian, which was actually what made them a great team.
“Maybe it was. I don’t think I’d blame someone.
From what I’ve gleaned, they were about one step away from that Nike cult who all took a permanent nap.
You know, Heaven’s Gate.” He cleared his throat and spit on the dirt.
“Or Waco. Take your pick. Good riddance.”
Regardless, no one was talking, and within a week, there were three dead bodies in the Hudson River, and Julian and Richard were told to focus their energies there since it was a suspected mob hit, and they’d been shadowing the ringleader for the better part of a year.
Their report on the church fire cited electrical issues, and Julian pretended to make peace with the loose ends.
But Julian had never been someone who made peace with loose ends.
He flipped to another photo.
Aaron Jones with his wife and five children.
They found his watch, his wedding band, matching DNA at the scene.
It wasn’t unreasonable that he was burned to ash and dust like 60 percent of the building; they’d seen that before in fireballs.
But it also wasn’t unreasonable to think that he hadn’t been.
And Julian believed in his bones that he hadn’t been.
He held his thumb and pointer finger in a loop, moving from face to face to face.
He stayed there for a long time, his fingers circling Aaron Jones’s youngest, who was unsmiling, discontent.
He couldn’t believe his luck when he tracked her down a few months back, so close to him. At a diner on the Upper West Side. Elizabeth. Betty.
What had she been thinking about when this photo was taken? What was she thinking about now? And more important, when should he tell her what he knew?